Maximizing Storage Performance and Savings with Amazon EBS gp3 and Ollion

By Derek Baltazar, Practice Principal, Ollion
By Michael Rechani, Senior Cloud Consultant, Ollion
By Shagun Beniwal, Technical Account Manager, AWS
By Roy Garcia, Technical Account Manager, AWS

Ollion

In today’s accelerated digital landscape, organizations must enhance their cloud capabilities to innovate and optimize costs. Ollion, an AWS partner, helps businesses transform their cloud strategy to maximize their AWS investments. Ollion blends technical expertise with an in-depth understanding of business challenges, allowing them to deploy AWS’s latest advanced solutions for its customers. With a global team of cloud-native experts and a history in AWS consulting, Ollion is committed to ensuring customers achieve their desired results without losing sight of the people these transformations impact. They help customers navigate the ever-evolving AWS ecosystem with continuous improvement to keep their cloud infrastructure efficient, reliable, and cost-effective.

In this blog, we explore how Ollion helps customers utilize Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) gp3 volumes and the benefits over previous generation gp2 volumes. We address familiar challenges faced with Amazon EBS and how Ollion collaborates with their customers to address these challenges. You will gain insights into the technical and business advantages of adopting this AWS service enhancement.

Amazon EBS Overview

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) is an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Rich in its service portfolio, Amazon EBS provides six volumes types: Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2 Block Express and io1), General Purpose SSD (gp3 and gp2), Throughput Optimized HDD (st1), and Cold HDD (sc1). These volume types differ in performance characteristics and price, allowing you to tailor your storage performance and cost to the needs of your applications.

Users generally start with general-purpose gp2 volumes, which increase in performance as they increase in size. When they want to scale performance and throughput independent of storage capacity, they can seamlessly migrate to gp3, a newer generation of general-purpose volumes that provides 20% lower price per GB than the gp2 volumes.

The transition from gp2 to gp3 volumes represents a significant evolution in EBS storage capabilities. While gp2 volumes provide a solid foundation, gp3 volumes elevate this offering by delivering higher baseline performance and throughput at a lower cost. This shift enhances storage efficiency and allows for up to 20% savings on costs, as detailed in AWS’s guidance on migrating from gp2 to gp3 volumes.

By prioritizing gp3 volumes, customers can leverage improved performance without incurring additional expenses, making it an ideal choice for those looking to optimize their storage solutions. This strategic approach, from gp2 to gp3, underscores Amazon EBS’s commitment to delivering flexible, high-performance, and cost-effective storage options that meet the evolving needs of applications.

The Volume Migration Challenge

Ollion has partnered with its customers who have had challenges maintaining their Amazon EBS storage infrastructure, challenges such as rising costs, unmanageable volumes, and the difficulty of keeping pace with the rapid innovation of cloud services.

The span of time from the release of the original Amazon EBS general purpose SSD (gp2) in 2014 to the latest Amazon EBS general purpose SSD (gp3) in 2020 has resulted in widespread deployments of gp2 volumes within organizations. As a customer’s digital footprint grows on AWS over the years, extensive and deep-rooted adoption of gp2 volumes necessitates managing and integrating new features, which some customers find challenging.

How Much Can You Save With Amazon EBS gp3?

Ollion’s Cloud Economics team utilizes specialized internal tools to analyze customer AWS infrastructure, helping customers calculate potential cost savings when migrating from Amazon EBS gp2 to Amazon EBS gp3. With the release of Amazon EBS gp3, AWS offers a potential savings of up 20% per GB compared to Amazon EBS gp2 volumes. Additionally, Ollion’s proprietary toolset and analytics platform have identified further cost-saving opportunities beyond just the migration from gp2 to gp3, enhancing the financial benefits of such initiatives.

In one case, Ollion helped identify over $300K in savings for a single customer. This significant one-time saving was achieved through a combination of strategies: 20% of the savings came from reducing volume costs by converting from Amazon EBS gp2 to gp3 volumes. The remaining up to 80% of savings were realized by identifying and eliminating unused volumes during a comprehensive EBS audit. This audit was part of the broader strategy to optimize the customer’s Amazon EBS infrastructure.

Migrating to Amazon EBS gp3

Migrating from Amazon EBS gp2 to Amazon EBS gp3 can be complex because of infrastructure sprawl and embedded provisioning practices. Infrastructure sprawl is the unchecked expansion and increasing complexity of infrastructure resources within an organization’s AWS environment. Meanwhile, embedded provisioning practices refer to the deeply ingrained use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which automates the deployment of cloud resources. These factors can complicate the migration process by adding layers of complexity to the management and upgrade of cloud infrastructure.

Ollion’s team of experts have developed customized AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) scripts that streamline the migration process from Amazon EBS gp2 to Amazon EBS gp3. Please note: The script should first be tested in a sandbox environment, and modified to your requirements, before being used in production.

Maintaining Amazon EBS Best Practices

To enforce that only the latest generation Amazon EBS gp3 volumes are deployed, robust guardrails can be implemented using native AWS services such as AWS Config, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Policies, AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs), and EBS tagging.

AWS Config continually assesses, audits, and evaluates the configurations and relationships of your resources on AWS, on premises, and on other clouds. Using AWS Config, we can assess changes to Amazon EBS volumes in a region. AWS Config can help track gp2 volumes existing in the environment and flag them as non-compliant if found.

IAM policies and AWS SCPs are also a great way to combat sprawl and maintain governance throughout the AWS environment. For example, IAM policies define what actions are allowed or denied for Amazon EBS volumes. While, SCPs can help prevent the creation of Amazon EBS volumes if you do not have encryption enabled or if another volume type besides Amazon EBS gp3 is chosen.

Additionally, Amazon EBS tagging can be a vital part of combating future Amazon EBS sprawl and maintaining good Amazon EBS hygiene. It can help with cost allocation, resource management, automation, and communication (answering questions like, “What is this EBS volume?” and “Who owns it?”)

Finally, IaC like AWS CloudFormation or Terraform templates can be used to define infrastructure as code for AWS resources. This allows you to consistently provision and manage Amazon EBS volumes and associated resources, making it easier to control sprawl.

Benefits: Performance, Savings, and Beyond

A well-planned strategy to implement an AWS service enhancement can provide the following technical and business benefits:

Technical Benefits:

• Performance improvement: Amazon EBS gp3 volumes are designed to offer higher baseline performance than Amazon EBS gp2 volumes. These volumes are designed to provide a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s throughput regardless of the volume size. Amazon EBS gp3 volumes offer higher price-to-performance ratio than Amazon EBS gp2 volumes, helping customers achieve higher performance at a lower cost.
• Better control: A thoughtful strategy by adding guardrails such as AWS Config rules and remediations, AWS SCP rules, and a robust IaC strategy are key to maintaining operational compliance to prevent future drift.

Business Benefits:

• Cost optimization: By implementing an Amazon EBS service enhancement with a partner like Ollion, you can recognize significant savings built into the service enhancement itself. Additionally, there is an added benefit of recognizing more cost savings as you clean up over-provisioned and unwanted volumes during the process.
• Gain visibility: You can gain increased visibility into your storage costs and resource allocation by tagging resources and filtering them to identify costs on environment level (Prod, Pre-Prod, Staging, etc), on Business Unit level, or on service level. Through this process, you can establish a sustainable, long-term strategy for keeping AWS costs in check.
• Build confidence through the process: One of the biggest benefits of working with a company like Ollion is learning from the experts. When you experience success in an enablement project, it breeds confidence across the organization. Ollion’s partnership with clients is not just pure delivery but often focuses on upskilling customer resources to be more effective operating in AWS.

Conclusion

In this post, we highlighted the importance of implementing the latest AWS technology to optimize cost and performance, using the migration of Amazon EBS gp2 to gp3 volumes as an example. However, navigating the complexities of AWS service enhancements requires a strategic and technical roadmap, a task many organizations find daunting. Partnering with AWS experts such as Ollion is crucial as they leverage AWS-native tools, tailored reporting, and deep expertise, ensuring a smooth transition that not only achieves immediate cost savings but also enhances performance and uncovers further cost-reduction opportunities.

Thank you for reading this blog. If you have questions or suggestions, leave them in the Comments section.

.

Ollion—AWS Partner Spotlight

Ollion (formerly 2nd Watch, Cloud Cover, & Cloud Comrade) provides cloud-native professional services and ongoing managed cloud services to organizations modernizing their IT infrastructure, services, applications, and data insights leveraging the power of public cloud. Ollion builds on strong technical foundations and has achieved 7 AWS Competencies, 6 AWS service validations and 100+ AWS certifications.

Contact Ollion | Partner Overview